Coco Chanel said "Once you've dressed, and before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take at least one thing off." This is what Baz should have done. In The Great Gatsby's case, a lot more than one thing should have been taken off or out of this film. It is Over The Top; Bad. Too much fake CGI.

In a major cinema complex in Sydney in Cinema 1 (largest theatre in the complex) on the second night of opening it was bearly one quarter full and even then a whole row of 10 patrons walked out after that silly scene in the underground jazz club.

It is a cacophony of nothingness. Too much fluff and tinsel. No sympathy for any character could be felt.

P.S. And the blinking green light... Yes, we can see it. Yes, we know what it means. Yes, we are not dumb!!

The at divide keeps getting wider.The once upon a time American Dream just doesn't add up. With the economic division more striking than ever, the American Dream is divided. You don't have to do the math to see the 2 schools of thought in this matter are as stark as black and white. Take a look http://wp.me/p2qifI-1F8

I wonder what was going on in Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette heads when society was debating the same question. The only thing for sure, as we all will have different answers, is that inequalities cause much unrest in society and when they go unaddressed, then society develops its own defence mechanisms to right the wrongs. It is not a question of being fair or unfair, it is a sign of imbalances in society which by nature is seeking equilibrium. Obviously, nothing will be in a perfect state of balance for a prolonged period of time, however it is simply foolish to think that this situation will continue to grow disproportionate without a major catalyst event to kick in suddenly and tip the balance over. It is just a matter of time before a major symbol emerges to rally all those currently in the street worldwide looking for a just cause to forge solidarity. So many people are currently manifesting their contempt under pretences that are only an excuse to show their disapproval. In France for example, as unlike Egypt, or any other nation that was under a dictatorship regime, most people suspected their government of major corruption, whether it was under the socialist Mitterrand or the pro-business Sarkozy's era. I doubt that the unpopularity of their current president Hollande has anything to do with his political ideologies, as in France or Europe for that matter, it is not a drastic departure from their past or origins. However, the people realize that society is greatly disturbed and victimized by a failed system allowed to continue by both sides, and that it is not government which is the root of the problem, as governments come and go in succession. The real problems are so deeply engrained in our society, that it will take more than just a government to rid us of this consistent drag on our societies. We are due for a major change os system, as I am reminded of Coluche's statement to the effect that if voting would allow for change, then it would be made illegal.

It is despairing to read an Economist column speaking out against liberal principles, and it seems to be an increasingly common phenomenon. Inequality? We are not equal. Different people are born in different circumstances and deal with it in different ways. We should have the freedom to develop ourselves to the best of our abilities within our constraints with the opportunities that we make and take.

@Vaudevillian, all Gary Kasparov has to do to beat you at chess is show up.

@MS, Germans have a SUPERIOR culture and work ethic to the Greeks. It's not JUST genetics, their schools are better because the governance is better and the Zeitgeist is more oriented towards prosperity. The Greeks may have better parties and beaches though.

@Doug Pascover, can't make any sense out of you. I don't expect you can either...

Most troubling is that this article completely misses the point. Unless the point is only to dump on Mankiw.

Dear Columnist,

How exactly are you proposing to close the unequal global wealth gap between the poor, old, recession-stricken "Western World" (Europe and America) and the rest of us?

Don't think for a second that yours are not rich girl problems. I'll tell you what, don't bother answering this rhetorical question. We will take this money from you. We will cut better deals with China, we will work MORE hours, we will be stronger and our markets freer.

And you? You will keep arguing whether it's "fair" to retire at 62 or 60 as prosperity and the age of "Western" dominance and imperialism fades away from memory into a mystical dream because of your own weakness.

You're really missing the point, because anyone with a success story to tell will say that it's not about where you start or how many pieces you have, it's about what you dream and what you do with them. Life isn't fair. Grow up.

"You're really missing the point, because anyone with a success story to tell will say that it's not about where you start or how many pieces you have, it's about what you dream and what you do with them. Life isn't fair. Grow up."

Well yes, because anyone with a success story by definition should have started out poor and ended up rich. Of course you're going to conclude that there is enough social mobility if you limit your sample size to those who have already successfully demonstrated it; but what about those millions of counter-examples? What about those who fail along that path through no fault of their own, and those who sit at the top through no merit of their own? What a weak analysis it is when you cherry pick your observations to prove your hypothesis.

That's right, life isn't fair. Now tell me, who is more grown up - the one who sits idly by content with injustice, or the one who actually attempts to do something to remedy the problem?

You raise several valid points and you sorely tempt me to make this personal, which I mean as a compliment. Of course, no one cares about my personal testimony so I will limit my reply to the general and hypothetical.

First, a success story by definition should start with the protagonist being poorER and end up richER. So you take success as a relative Value, not only within the trajectory of the protagonist's life story but also relative to the environment.

It is wrong to treat wealth as a relative value. The true measure and value of wealth is life and quality of life, which is not counted in dollars or minutes. Life is absolute, either it is or isn't and any member of the global middle class, as well as many of the "poor", has a better quality of life than any monarch of Europe 300 years ago because we have electricity and running water, cars and telephones. If you want to improve everyone's lot focus on technology, not on "redistributing" the dollars.

Second, what are your "millions" of counter-examples? For rhetorical purposes I will take on the most controversial, the family man who lost his job. He can't pay bills, no one gives him a break, and though it truly breaks my heart and I feel for that man I have to ask, what did he do to prepare? See, in life s*** happens and you can't reasonably expect daddy or the government to bail you out. Borrowing to buy a house, to buy a car, to go on vacation. That is not the action of a prudent man who wants to ascend on the wealth ladder. It is the action of a fool who wanted to appear to ascend by reaping the fruits of his labor before sowing it. "No fault of their own"? Check again, no one deserves to be rich or poor, you are either or neither as a consequence of your actions.

I'm not cherry picking my arguments, I'm being as concise as possible.

Third, (and thank you for this nugget) I DO NOT sit idly by. I am very much engaged in serving my community with my own means and time. Injustice? Where is the justice in taking from those who are productive to give to those who are less or non-productive? If you attempt to remedy the problem by hiring bums into your place of business or inviting the homeless to live in your house to change their lives with your own means, you are a noble fool. I think it more likely that you pay lip service to the idea of equality and vote for the party that "stands for the poor" wherever you are from. Is that you idea of remedy? Meanwhile, you don't talk as someone who's seen starvation first hand, let alone know true hunger. You want the bankers to pay more taxes. Face it, all you got is Rich Girl Problems, Ianuus.

"Second, what are your "millions" of counter-examples? For rhetorical purposes I will take on the most controversial, the family man who lost his job."

Unfortunately, either intentionally or not, here you have created a strawman. Perhaps I should have made it clearer in my original post, but I do not consider the unemployed as victims of distribution. They are the victims of the necessary process of demand and supply in the labour market, and while I hope the government gives them a basic standard of living for benedictory purposes, they are not an appropriate example illustrating the justice of distribution. A more apt example would be the stereotypical black man born in the south-east, where preexisting social contexts prevent access to a good education and thus prevents income mobility.

"Check again, no one deserves to be rich or poor, you are either or neither as a consequence of your actions."

You seem like a reasonable man, so it astounds me that you cling to this statement when both M.S. and Mankiw have stated outright that this isn't true in the article we're both commenting on. If income mobility is low where income inequality is high, then it means that in these situations income is not explained by a person's actions, but rather by a person's income endowment. This central principle of your argument is refuted not by anecdote or theory but by empirical analysis, and I have yet to see conflicting evidence of the same level of rigour.

Even at a theoretical level, this statement does not hold up. While we've all been taught in econ101 that in a free market, agents are paid their marginal output, this only occurs in a spherical vacuum no matter how just and optimal it might be. I believe that the real-world situation is better analysed through the framework of game theory, which results in scenarios where surplus is distributed not based on productivity but by a series of game-theoretical outcomes as a result of scarcity and competition. If you happen to know any game theory, surplus distribution in competing cooperative games would be a starting point.

Now, I would hate for this discussion to dissolve into a Pythonesque argument about which one of us came from a worse background, so I'll just remind you that your entire third point is pretty much just assumptions about my character and not about the argument we're having, so I won't bother to make a counter. But just FYI, I came from inland China in a family without connections and am now a synthetic chemist in Australia, so I believe I have it covered on both your "seen starvation first hand" and "focus on technology" fronts.

As for remedy, I'm not quite sure. Definitely taxing bankers would be a great starting point (I find (anecdotally) they get far greater return than their marginal productivity anyway) but spending the revenue would be a problem. The standard response would be to put it into public education and health, but I've seen how the American Government goes about doing that, and it ain't pretty. But hey, that's why I'm in science and not in Government, right?

In nature, not everyone can live well-off. That's the sad reality most people can't accept. It is impossible for everyone to be well off because when that happens people either take up more resources or have more children who take up more resources. After a while things will get harder and people will become poorer. A big thing I can't ever understand is why people come into the discussion of income inequality implying everyone, or almost everyone, can be well-off if taxes just increase. This is unsustainable after a while.
It wasn't long ago that people needed 8 kids for just 2 to survive. What makes people think in the future humans will have it easy forever?

Vaudevillain is spot on but there's also another issue with his chess example, assuming money worked the way Mankiw suggests through his example. Mankiw complete ignores the ability of people to learn how to play the game (cheese, life, etc) better. For instance, I play racquetball. When I started my freshman year of college, I sucked. Couldn't beat a soul. Eventually, though, I started playing against better and better competition and consequently became better myself. I've even managed to beat a #1 ranked professional player (once and throughly ravished every other match). Point being, when the individuals with less skill intermix with the masters, all of those with less skill will improve, maybe not a lot but some, and some will improve enough to dethrone the masters, albeit temporarily.

the distribution of posts on this blog grossly is unequal. i demand 1 person from a different country on the globe gets to post on a rotating basis. that is the only way to check to see if things are fair. to use the modern nation state as the common unit of measurement and compare countries no matter how different their demographic composition or history precedents.

please let me know when the lottery for american posters is held as i would like to be in that drawing. thank you.

I read Democracy in America via an RSS feed, and the initials of the author are not visible, as they are on the web page.
I've noticed an interesting phenomenon though: when I read a post here that gets me angry, or has me rolling my eyes in disbelief, it's almost invariably W.W., and when I read something that has me cheering and saying "exactly" all the way through, it's always M.S.
Good job Matt Steinglass. What one has to wonder is Mankiw somehow deliberately not seeing these points, or is his committed ideological defense of wealth responsible for the gaping blind-spot in his moral view of humanity? I once thought the Calvinist idea of pre-destination was dead, but it still seems to have a strong grip on many minds, even if they aren't even aware of it.

This is one of a series of articles in TE over the last year about the influence of origins on social advancement. The academic evidence is mounting that life chances are just as important as hard work and ability.
This belief is one of the kids that was exposed as not wearing shorts when the GFC sent the tide out (along with its rather precocious siblings quant analysis and rational purchasing assumptions).
Unfortunately this does rather contradict shibboleth number one of the American dream. Which I suspect is why some increasingly desperate arguments are being ranged against it.
The new Brit royal baby is going to have much better opportunities than all the other kids born in the UK today, regardless of ability. And in the US, another scion of the Bush political dynasty started his career yesterday, with a massive boost from his surname.
All other things being equal, talent and hard work will allow someone to get on; but if the playing field is uneven different outcomes are almost guaranteed.

Of course circumstances matter. That's why you're supposed to work hard to ensure the best circumstances for your offspring. Asian cultures are one of the few in America to still practice this, while the rest of us have seemingly unlearned this fundamental human concept.

The differences in income mobility by region raise some interesting questions, though, especially in the US. As the US has become more socially stratified and economically/politically segregated (the heartland is more and more right-leaning, the coasts are more and more left-leaning), could this be driving income inequality in an at least somewhat benign way? After all if you grow up in a small rural town in a poor state, you could be born into a poor family, work hard, start a local business, and do quite well for yourself but still not end up anywhere near the top of the national income distribution, even if you would perceive yourself as having experienced "the American dream."

Alternatively you could grow up in a small rural town in a poor state and find yourself drawn to living in New York City for whatever reason, and find a relatively low-skilled job as a receptionist or the like and yet make more than your parents bring in doing more skilled work back home. That isn't really social mobility, especially since your costs of living in NYC would be much higher, but it would look like it in the income mobility charts. To the extent that people in rural communities are raised to see city people as "not like us," and choose to make that switch less often, there would be effectively less income mobility.

I'm not overly familiar with the literature on the topic so perhaps this has already been taken into account, for example by studying how much mobility exists within the income quintiles of a given state, rather than moving among the national quintiles. It is also not clear that this would actually be a new phenomenon or would be increased due to recent increased political polarization, since rural people have always thought city people were "not like us." But there is something there -- just as someone in Greece is unlikely to reach top German levels of income, simply because very few in Greece make that much (due to macro factors, not their own merits), someone in Mississippi is very unlikely to reach Connecticut levels of income.

At the very least, the fact that the US encompasses such disparate regions and that people may choose to effectively put a cap on their lifetime earnings by choosing for personal/social reasons to stay in a poorer region instead of moving to a richer region makes the picture different than somewhere like the Netherlands where regional distinctions and people choosing to stay in one place will be far less significant, which makes the US picture more like the EU than like its individual member countries. Perhaps that is what Mankiw was trying to say (or should be trying to say).

Thank you bgriff – you are closer to the truth than Mankiw (and most others responding to this article).

Culture and satisfaction within a sphere of friends make a tremendous difference in motivation. Compare the motivation reflected in the fascinating movie “Zorba the Greek” with motivated movements in Germany (savor the German culture to appreciate their motivation). Islamic fundamentalists strive to preserve a culture that may inherently be antagonistic to the culture required for industrial progress.

A homogeneous culture (e.g., Japan) represents an environment for a lower Gini coefficient than that in a country fabricated from a wide variety of backgrounds and a mix of cultures (e.g., the U.S.). One country in Europe generally has a lower Gini coefficient than all of Europe combined. Adding multiple disparate economic groups together for statistical analysis inevitably leads to greater scatter than that in one group.

Yes, basic IQ is one factor in generating inequality (and Mankiw’s position at Harvard may make him proud of the advantages of a high IQ). But many other factors not included in these articles lead to inequality.

Yes, the income difference between Connecticut and Mississippi reflects differences in culture, motivation, ambition, family roots, and significant differences in a desire to live among one’s peers.

I am shocked and somewhat dismayed by the amount of support openly socialist policies appear to be receiving from the most unexpected quarters.

As usual, the arguments for redistribution largely confuse causes with effects. The proposed solutions are akin to uprooting corn from a field and planting it in sand, because it is unfair to the sand to be barren. But that is not for lack of corn. In fact, it is the other way around.

Worryingly, the argument also presupposes there is but one cause of inequality.

Nonsense. German inequality is a result of entrepreneurial innovation and industrial competition, whereas Greek inequality is largely the result of corruption and rent seeking.

Whether a person becomes rich by starting a company, employing people, introducing a superior product or service and benefitting society, or whether it is a result of cronyist ties and backhanders makes all the difference not just in the world, but in the entire god damn galaxy.

Needless to say, redistributive policies and attempts to police the playground make the latter infinitely easier. Observe the "equality" Soviet Union enjoyed. This is a staple of egalitarian forms of organisation. All are equal, but some are more equal.

State-created inequality, which is just another form of violence-based inequality, is the problem. Not inequality per se. There is also the option to let the state uphold a legal framework and not interfere in the game, an option that seems both singularly sensible and increasingly rare.

American inequality is attributable to regional differences in culture, mindset and yes, demographics. One need not be a racist to recognize difference.

American inequality is largely fair. Yes, there are worrying ties to the government, especially in the green tech (oxymoron?) and military industrial complexes, but by and large, the average rich American got that way in a honest and productive way. This is a singular merit of a free market system.

A more equal society is surely an aesthetically and morally pleasing goal, which is incidentally an entirely different question from justice. Everybody wants to live in a world where people are prosperous and a chimneysweep can be a billionaire if he plays his cards right and has a good idea.

My problem with the American socialists is not in their advocacy of redistribution but in their justifications for it. They insist it's not charity but just deserts. They insist the status quo is a market failure and that it's economically efficient to redistribute. They've lost all sense of charity and the common good. I know many on the far right are cold-hearted and individualistic but it's no less true on the far left. They may advocate redistribution but it's for entirely selfish reasons.

Sounds to me like the University of Melbourne Chess Club 1978-1980. The in-joke at the time was that Ian Rogers ????international master???? already was on his way up to be a grand master; that we were the "grand master training school." I remember a few years later my interest in computer chess programming had riled him.

The next stage of evolution is the building of chess programs so powerful that not even grand masters have a chance.

Another problem facing the intelligent but unconnected outsider is the uneducated prejudices of snickering metropolitan elites, not everybody from Mississippi was born with six fingers and old granddaddy JR's buck teeth.

"Tennessee Williams (heard of him?), Fred Smith (ex marine was it and Fed-ex founder) Elvis Presley..."
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Interesting list. One born in 1911 (long since deceased), one in 1935 (long deceased), and one in 1944. So, can you think of anyone younger than, say, 65 (and John Grisham doesn't count)?
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"Another problem facing the intelligent but unconnected outsider is the uneducated prejudices of snickering metropolitan elites..."
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Ah yes, the dreaded metropolitan elite card. If you notice that Mississippi has the highest poverty, the shortest lifespan, and the most right-wing politics of the 50 US states, you're an elite.
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Apparently, if you also notice that Willie Mays had more home runs (660) than Mickey Mantle (536) you're an elite who hates whites from Oklahoma, when in fact you're just someone who can read a stats sheet.

Does Oprah Winfrey (born 1954) count? She has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century,[5] the greatest black philanthropist in American history,[6][7] and was for a time the world's only black billionaire.

The results won't fit into anyone's existing ideologies. Liberals will be happy to learn that high mobility is correlated with higher taxes, a larger middle class, better K-12 education, and less racial and economic segregation. Conservatives will be happy to hear that it's also correlated with religious involvement and two-parent households but is NOT correlated with the wealth of the 1%, welfare policy, or accessibility to higher education. Racists will be happy to learn that high mobility is correlated with less black people.

The South has the worst mobility and the fly-over states from Wisconsin to Utah have the highest.

Because if you aren't with us, you're against us. Mankiw's post was completely apolitical and he explicitly says there are no policy implications to be drawn. But he didn't jump on board the Great Gatsby Curve argument for less income inequality so he's racist.

It seems to me that Mankiw is not making one case or another, but rather criticizing the manner in which the Great Gatsby curve is measured. He is saying it is unsurprising we see what we do because of the mere fact that inequality is persistent (for the reasons the article describes). In other words, the curve is uninformative. In addition, he is saying that the curve is dependent on arbitrary political boundaries, and questions whether this dependence is desirable in its construction. A curve that merely outlines a near-tautological relationship (namely, that inequality is persistent) doesn't seem to be all that useful (is Mankiw's argument).

Reading through RR and others' posts, it seems that many question both the tautological nature of the curve and, by extension, the social problem it illustrates. I agree that there is a problem, in the same way that growing old and dying is a problem and the energy expended on breathing is a problem. Until there is a major paradigm shift in technology or social structure, these things are not going away. In this case you would have to abolish the right for a family to spend its earnings on its children for the barriers to social mobility to fall. Not a bad idea in theory, but in practice not going to happen in our lifetimes, and thus the curve remains a tautology.

Not at all; because if the relation between inequality and mobility is so strong as to being tautological, then the conservative fantasy of a society with high inequality and high mobility would be impossible. Contrary to what Mankiw states, this obviously has immediate consequences on policy choice and socio-economic ideology.

High inequality/high mobility is not a thing that can be achieved by targeting this curve; that is Mankiw's point. Policies that reduce inequality would increase social mobility by construction; the implied policy choice of targeting inequality to increase social mobility is faintly ridiculous. We would then be at 0 inequality with undefined social mobility. Of course this relationship exists, but it should not be the focal point of overall policy. Rather, we should be focused on ways to shift the curve.

This is not unlike a firm with a defined revenue/ROI tradeoff function deciding that cutting costs is its best strategy for increasing ROI. While strictly true, you would hope that other strategies that shift the curve so that the tradeoff is less drastic would take priority. Shifting along the curve is merely an accounting trick, an illusion of success that is useful in a pinch but which should fool no one.

Mankiw is for greater income equality through redistribution. Seriously. He just thinks inequality is economically efficient and is not primarily the result of rigging the game. Reading the comments, you'd think that what we believe are the causes of inequality and the desirability of inequality have to be ideologically aligned. Why?

The big problem with the chess analogy is that in order to hold true for economics the way it seems to be used here (instead of reading Mankiw, I work for a living) some things would have to be true about how money works that simply are not.

The main one is that in chess, each player starts the game with a symmetrical state: 1 king, 1 queen, 2 bishops, 2 knights, 2 rooks, 8 pawns all with equal starting position. This means that in any game of chess, one would generally expect to see the more skilled player win. Economic transactions don't work that way: if I start the game with $1, and you start the game with $1bn, you pretty much don't have to play, and I need to be exceptional to even compete.

The analogy actually works better if it shows a chess club with a special set of rules: for each game a player wins, they start future games with an additional piece, and for each game a player loses they are forced to start future games with one fewer. Between players of roughly equal skill, the extra pieces probably more or less balance out over time such that everyone remains more or less equal. In the masters/novices club, however, you will quickly see the masters reach a point where they have more pieces than can fit on the board to start each game and the novices are essentially starting the game in checkmate. At this point, the masters are no longer even playing against the novices, they just periodically show up, automatically win a game, and stockpile another backup pawn. They aren't winning by virtue of better play in the present, but by better play in the past which conveys a virtually insurmountable advantage at the outset.

In short: it's really easy not to lose when you win just by showing up.

Actually, in a club of initially equal-skilled players who play by the rules that winning gains one more points in future games, inequality would develop. Inequality would not develop if however players are matched based on the number of pieces they have, one caveat which I will drop as a not enumerated complication to the posited situation.

In the first game, with an equal number of pieces for each side, and with equally skilled players, it is essentially a coin flip who wins. Say Player A wins, and gains advantageous points for the next game. Player B is stuck with the standard set for next game.

Imagine that this initial game occurs between many initial pairings in this club. What we now have are many losers (B's) with the initial set and an equal number of winners (A's) with enhanced sets.

In round 2 there are 3 possible match-ups: those between two losers, two winners, and those between one loser and one winner. Because skill is uniform, the games are biased towards those who have the advantage of more pieces.

What we get after round two are a number of B's from games where B's played each other, a new batch of A's from games where B's played each other, a veteran batch of A's from games where two A's played each other, B's from the A on B games, and now A+'s from games where A played B and won due to the advantage.

Round three would have more possible match-ups, with predictable victories: B on B (toss up, winner becoming an A), B on A (A becomes a A+), A on A (a toss up where the winner becomes a A+), A+ on B (A+ demolishing them to become A++), A+ on A (A+ winning to gain an extra +), and finally A+ on A+ (toss up, one A+ becoming A++).

You can see that the number of possible points of advantages has now in only three games increased from 0 (everyone with the same set in game 1, there is no advantage) to 2 in game 2 (the distinction between A and B) to 3 in game 3 (B, A, A+). Going into game 4 there would be 4 (B, A, A+, A++). Every round would increase the number of positions by 1.

Every round would increase the potential bias in advantage that the top position has over B, ensuring an even more their victory, further solidifying their ascent.

This is all in the club where everyone has the same skill level. Disparity occurs in any system where previous success confers advantages.

In the mixed master-novice club it is also entirely possible that the very same winner-takes-some-benefits mechanism could potentially create mobility and see some of the novices come to challenge masters. This would be more likely if skill can be wiped out by having more pieces, at least at some point.

If in your mixed club the first games have three different match-ups, novice-novice, master-master, novice-master. They all start with the same set, no advantage their yet. In n-n and m-m pairs it is a coin flip. In the n-m club the master wins. Going into game 2 you would have some novices with an advantage in pieces that when pitted against a not-advantaged novice will help them win. Same thing goes for m-m pairs. Pairings between previously advantaged novices and not-advantaged masters might now be more competitive, if the skill difference is not that huge. At the end of game two though, you would have some advantages novices who beat not-advantaged novices and became even more advantaged. They might be even more competitive in the next game against masters who have won twice, perhaps two extra pieces is all it really takes to wipe out the skill advantage.

Of course, some masters would have won multiple times too, and be skilled and have advantage. They would certainly continue to push up the maximum of the distribution.

As games continue however, there would be some games where novices kept on rolling their advantage on other novices and gain more advantage. This would easily happen if games are randomly paired up. Some novices lucky to have some initial wins and be paired against other novices could amass armies of pieces, in a somewhat bottom-feeder fashion. Some of these advantage-surfing novices would come to have some many pieces that so far less successful masters become prey. Before you know it, some initial novices have piece sets that push them up into the areas of the distribution of victory probability previously reserved for masters. Definitely some masters with losing records would gripe about some novices coming in with unbeatable piece sets, wiping out any initial advantage in skill. This is basically the logic of the original poster's second paragraph.

As you can see again, a system that endows advantages to winners of previous rounds will create an ever-increasing range of advantage. In the homogenous skill set club, this essentially all falls on the number of previous wins. In the heterogeneous club, we start to see that skill too can be outstripped by the number of previous wins.

How much incompetence can be accepted by a flawed set of rules before society (or a chess club) suffers? Societies have no interest in maintaining incompetents at the top where they can cause great damage.

The interesting question is: at which point inequality becomes damaging to the group because talent is overshadowed and economical decline ensues? When does the chess club start slipping in the league to the point that it collapses or its board of directors is overthrown?

But another question is this: can the dilemma of inequality be captured only in economical terms? Fairness, this ethereal concept, is usually not at the top of the list of human aspirations, but it is a human aspiration nonetheless. As societies evolve and basic needs are fulfilled, one would expect inequality to diminish to attend to this higher aspiration. An increase of inequality signals, according to this view, a step back for society. The Past tells us that powerful empires can be built on a slave economy. We are not in the Past. We move forward, we learn, we evolve, we improve, we aspire to greater things.